Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

“What are those things, the ones with the U-235 on them? Are they bombs?”

“I’m not sure. Sean said they might contain some very dangerous stuff.”

“And this number?” She touched the screen with a perfect fingernail.

“It’s the identifying numbers on the outside of the U-boat.”

She moved her hips, her warmth slowly gyrating against Jason. “So, where are the skeletons, mister boner?”

He grinned. “Right here.”

“Ohmygod!”

“Yeah, Sean only took one. I think Nick would have had a heart attack if Sean kept taking pictures of the skeletons. Nick’s like real weird in that way. I don’t think he’ll ever go down there again?”

“Would you?”

“I didn’t go. It’s pretty deep. Sean’s some kind of an expert SCUBA diver from his military days. Nick’s part human and part dolphin. The guy used to free dive, like they do for pearls. Only he did it getting sponges off the ocean floor when he was twelve over in the Greek islands. Guy’s a freakin’ animal. I gotta pee real bad.” He stood, the wine now causing him to be dizzy.

Nicole smiled. “Looks like you’ve reached your limit, Jason. Try not to get sick in my parent’s bathroom, okay lover?”

“I’m just gonna pee, c’mon, Nicole.”

When Jason left the balcony, Nicole held his cell phone, punched up her personal e-mail, attached the pictures and hit the send button.

O’Brien returned to his home on the banks on the St. Johns River for the night. As much as he enjoyed time on Jupiter and the company of the marina folk, he liked the solitude he found in the place he now called home. He liked his big, antique bed. His house was a seventy-year-old “Florida Cracker” home built on an Indian shell mound overlooking the river. The old home was made from cypress, oak, heart-of-pine, and it had a massive river-rock fireplace, tin roof, and a sprawling screened-in porch. The porch, with a view of the river, was constructed from white oak beams that bent and snapped nails like toothpicks.

In the kitchen, O’Brien poured some Jameson over ice. As he walked to the porch, he stopped and stared down at a picture of his wife, Sherri. She stood at the helm of their sailboat, wind in her hair, morning light in her eyes, a smile that penetrated O’Brien’s heart like the first time he whispered his love to her. He touched the picture, the glass hard to his touch.

Max trotted in from the porch. She sat and cocked her head, looking up at O’Brien. He said, “I miss Sherri, Max. I know you do, too. How about I join you back out there for some fresh air, little one?”

On the porch, he sat in a big whicker rocker and lifted Max onto his lap where she curled into a ball. O’Brien sipped his drink and looked at the reflection of a harvest moon off the river’s dark surface. Frogs and cicadas competed for dominance in the theater of the night. The scent of blooming jasmine and orange blossoms mingled in the air with wood smoke from across the river, somewhere in the national forest. A great horned owl alighted on a thick, crooked limb reaching up from a cypress tree down by the river. Spanish moss hung from the limb, motionless in the still air, the owl’s silhouette caught in the rising moon.

O’Brien thought about the discovery of the sub, its potential revelations, the media attention, how it might play out. And he thought about Jason Canfield. The kid definitely had his mother’s eyes. He hoped Jason took their conversation to heart. He scratched Max behind her ears and mumbled, “When the past intersects with the present … the future could be in somebody’s crosshairs ….”

What was it? Something was churning in his gut. He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and replayed Maggie’s visit to his boat. What tugged at his thoughts as if weights were in his shoes? What was out of sync? When she’d hugged him, his memory banks registered the scent of her perfume, as if twenty two years was two seconds. He hadn’t smelled that particular brand on any other woman. She’d felt so small in his arms. He remembered that she had a physical presence of strength, a rare combination of athleticism wrapped in feminine sexuality. He sipped his drink and wondered what Maggie was doing tonight. He had a strong urge to pick up the phone and call her. To talk about old times … to just to hear Maggie’s voice tonight.

The Irish whiskey took the edge off the day. He thought about the events. Sure it was coincidental that he docked Jupiter less than two miles from an old girlfriend he hadn’t seen in what seemed like a few generations. As a detective, he’d learned to be wary of chance because of criminal circumstances. What was mixing in his gut with the whiskey?

The guy at the Tiki Bar.

Kim Davis had introduced the man as Eric Hunter, a friend of Frank Canfield, Maggie’s dead husband. Coincidental? Maybe. Maybe not. O’Brien knocked back the rest of his drink and listened to a bull gator grunt at river’s edge. It was the start of mating season. The natives were restless. O’Brien could identify on some primal level. He gently lifted Max and said, “Let’s hit the bed, lady. Maybe you can teach an old dog like me how to sleep like you.” She licked O’Brien on his unshaven face.

Although he had returned to the comfort of his own bed at home on the banks of the St Johns River, calm was an ephemeral feeling. His sleep had been awakened by silent screams from human skeletons and the punctuated chant from a whippoorwill in an ancient live oak outside his window. He saw Maggie’s face and then a close-up of Jason’s eyes-frightened eyes.

O’Brien shook the narcotic of sleep’s illusion away and watched early morning light pour through an opening in the curtains on his bedroom window. He replayed the images he and Nick had seen around the sunken U-boat. The human remains, the mystery surrounding the sinking of the sub, the cargo of rockets, jet parts, and two canisters lovingly sealed by Pandora herself. He thought about Maggie Canfield, more than twenty years ago when she was Maggie Greene. And he thought about the telephone call he received from the woman who identified herself as Abby Lawson.

In his rambling kitchen, O’Brien made a pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, called Max from her roost in his recliner, stepped onto the porch, and walked down the sloping backyard to his dock that extended fifty feet into the river. His property bordered the Ocala National Forest. From the view on his dock, the river made a wide oxbow turn, flowing around live oaks, the limbs draped heavy with beards of pewter-gray Spanish moss.

It was about a half hour after sunrise and the river looked like hammered copper. The morning light broke through the cypress trees, illuminating water bugs on the surface as they made figure eights and elliptic orbits resembling tiny skaters. A slight breeze carried the scent of honeysuckles, decaying oak leaves, and damp moss.

O’Brien and Max watched a great blue heron stalk the tannin water, stopping to carefully step over cypress knees that protruded up from the dark mire like giant, gnarled fingers. His thoughts drifted back to the discovery of the U-boat and its cargo.

Max turned her head, the alarms firing in her brain. O’Brien had noticed that her reaction to human-produced sounds and scents was different from those in nature. Her defense mechanisms ignited faster when approached by intruders walking upright.

O’Brien scratched her back. “You have hound dog ears, and you can certainly hear things I can’t. What do you hear, Max?”

She half barked and half whined, paced the dock, and started to run toward the house. “Hold on, Max. How do those little legs move so fast, huh?”